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Tuesday, June 27, 2017

Nine Things You Didn’t Know Were Medieval

From vegetarian meat substitutes to beach parties – find out what came from the Middle Ages!

Margarete Peutinger

1. Toddlers & Tiaras
Humanist power couple Konrad and Margarethe Peutinger might just be
the OG stage parents. They saw themselves as at the helm of an Augsburg
ascendant in the cadre of elite, wealthy, learned European cities. So
when they learned that the Holy Roman Emperor would be in town soon, in
1503 they prepared. Or rather, they prepared their, Juliana, who had
just turned three. Konrad and Margarethe devoted most of a year to
forcing their toddler to memorize a Latin oration. She was to
serve as a exemplar of what a fine, classical city Augsburg was, that
even a little child, even a female child could be so well
educated. When her parents finally paraded her before the emperor to say
her piece, Maximilian asked little Juliana what she wanted for her
achievement. The answer? Just a doll—a toy to play with.
Oh, and when Juliana died just a couple years later, Konrad and
Margarethe repeated the same tricks on a smaller scale with their next
daughter.

2. Steampunk Fashion

Portrait believe to be of Beatrice d’Este, by
Giovanni Ambrogio de Predis

The wheel of fortune is a recurring theme in medieval literature and
art: the goddess Fortuna, sometimes bald and sometimes blind, cranks her
wheel around, cycling medieval people through the stages of fate: I
will reign, I reign, I reigned, I have lost my kingdom. For most of the
Middle Ages, though, artistic depictions of the rota fortunae
and other crank/gear machines have a problem: they can’t possibly work.
Western Europe had lost the knowledge of how to work gears and cranks.
As this knowledge filtered back into the west from the Muslim world
in the late Middle Ages, one of its most visible and prestigious
applications was the mechanical clock. Clocks and their components came
to serve as markers of prestige, whether that meant a gorgeous city
clock on a church or civic building, or a timepiece in the background of
a royal portrait.
And in some cases, it even meant fashion. In fifteenth-century Italy,
it was all the rage to display clocks and clock parts on one’s clothing
at parties. Beatrice d’Este, wife of Milan’s soon-to-be duke, had a
special request for her dress for a 1488 ball. The clock she wore, she
insisted, not only had to function, it had to ring the hours.

3. Air pollution
From nineteenth-century London pea soup fog to twenty-first century
China, we associate clogging, choking smog with industry, factories, and
cramped urbanization. But as a growing medieval population burned
through its wood supply for fuel and construction, households and
workshops increasingly turned to coal as an alternate fuel. In 1307, a
royal decree barred the brewers, potters, and bakers of London from
burning coal instead of wood or charcoal in their ovens, citing
complaints from all levels of the population that “an intolerable smell
diffuses itself throughout the neighboring places, and the air is
greatly infected…to the detriment of bodily health.”

4. Playing pretend
Byzantine religious writing, as John Duffy and Brigitte Pitarakis
have highlighted, is packed with references to children playing pretend.
For example, little Athanasius of Alexandria—yes, that
Athanasius—was caught playing on the beach with some friends. What was
their game? Bishops and baptizees. A little later, Damascene-Egyptian
monk John Moschos told a similar story about children in his
neighborhood. Their chosen sacrament to playact was not baptism but the
Eucharist, reflecting their own exposure to church ritual.
Naturally, theological writers are thrilled by these events, viewing
them as prophetic for the future sanctity and fruitful religious careers
of the children involved. In the west, however, writers tended to take a
more pragmatic approach. When children in the streets are playacting at
war, the collection of semi-satirical proverbs known as the Distaff Gospels remarks archly, you can count on actual war being not far in the future.

5. Vegetarian meat substitutes

Beinecke MS.229 f. 293r

When teenagers and adults turn vegetarian or vegan today, there are
two basic strategies for crafting a diet that is not just piles of
grilled cheese and spaghetti. The first is to explore the exciting world
of foods that are vegetarian from the ground up—wonderful bean and
vegetable and grain based dishes from cultures around the world. The
other is to entrench oneself in the world of meat and dig into
vegetarian substitutes for hamburgers, hot dogs, chicken fingers,
sausage, turkey, and once I even saw vegetarian “canned tuna” which WHY.
By the time medieval people started writing original cookbooks in the fourteenth century, of course, they had had centuries
to get used to not eating meat on Fridays, during Lent, and on other
fasting days. Surely the powers of culinary creativity would be
unleashed for extra special dishes. And yet, recipe after recipe for
meat dishes like lasagna simply includes the “Lent” variation. For the
most part, this meant creating a vaguely meat-looking, though clearly
not – tasting, substitute out of ground-up nuts.
The other option, of course, was to flat-out purchase an
exemption to fasting rules from one’s parish, which takes “there is no
such thing as ethical consumption” to a whole new level.

6. The slap-slap sound of flip-flops
One of my favorite religious-legal anecdotes comes from ninth-century
al-Andalus, on the subject of women’s attire. The extent to which
medieval Muslim (and Greek Christian) women wore veils in public is a
hotly debated topic, given both the fragmentary source record and the
modern political implications. Right now, most scholars hazily stipulate
that veiling in public and/or seclusion at home were religious ideals
and, more to the point, a class privilege. It was a social marker of
great success for a man to be able to support a wife/wives/concubines
who did not have to conduct business outside the home to support the
family. This seems like a very male take on an intimately woman’s issue, so let’s turn to famed jurist Yahya ibn ‘Umar:

Yahya was asked about a kind of
sandal or flip-flop. Are shoemakers forbidden to make them? Because
women look for these flip-flops on purpose, with the intention of
wearing them…in public. And so it happens that, if a man is
absent-minded, when he hears these “chirping” mules he raises his head.

Assuming this scenario reflects actual practice (and later, similar versions seem to suggest so), the humble slap-slap or flip-flop
noise opens a sliver of a window into the piety of medieval Muslim
women. It would seem to suggest that women adopted whatever veiling
practices were typical, preserving their modesty in one-on-one
interactions. And yet they resisted the interpretation that veiling was a
way to symbolically erase them from public presence: the sound of their
sandals insisted on their presence.

7. Beach parties
For all the wonderful beach coastline of Europe and North Africa, we
don’t hear a lot about “fun in the sun” in medieval sources. The early
references to building sand castles and to collecting seashells are
distinctly classical, not medieval—and even the seashell collection is a
sad bit of polemic/satire, as failed general Caligula irrationally
orders his men to gather shells as “war booty.” In fact, medieval
shoreline stories tend to involve dead bodies, whether it’s a ghost come
to warn someone not to sail because their ship is going to capsize
(spoiler: it does), or Scandinavian practices of burying the bodies of
the disgraced dead on the edge of the beach as a sort of no man’s land.

Photo by William Cho / Flickr

But you know who knew how to party on the beach? The Muslims of
Sicily and North Africa. One famous account has a group of
raiders/pirates roll up to the Apulian shore in the mid-eleventh
century. They demand tribute from the people of Salerno in exchange for,
well, for destroying everything they hold dear including their own
lives. While Christian officials are off dutifully and fearfully
gathering money and goods to pay off the raiders,

[The raiders] gave themselves up to feasting and mirth on the plain between the city and the sea.

Unfortunately for our picnickers, though, Orderic Vitalis goes on to explain how the strong brave manly Normans did what the Italians couldn’t, and kicked them off the beach and back out to sea.

Photo by Melinda Shelton / Flickr

8. Snowmen
Medieval snowball fights are fairly well known these days thanks to
the Internet popularity of some depictions of them. But if snow can be
packed into a ball, people knew, it could surely be sculpted into
something much more significant.
One story about St. Francis of Assisi portrays snowmen as anything
but fun. Overcome by lust in the middle of one winter’s night, Francis
rushes out naked into the snowy garden. He makes seven shapes out of
snow to represent the household he might have: his wife, his children,
his servants. But they are people made of snow: they are dying of cold,
and naked Francis does not even have his own cloak to give them. The
lesson Francis taught himself, according to hagiographer Bonaventure, is
that he could not serve seven masters, he could only serve the one true
Master. The lesson for modern sensibilities is usually, let’s focus on
the stories about Francis and animals, mmkay?
But snowmen were not always so grim. The winter of 1510-1511 was
exceptionally harsh in the Low Countries, according to chroniclers, but
the good people of Brussels made the best of it. From January into
February, the craftsmen of the town organized a veritable snowman
festival. All over the city, they lovingly constructed snow into works
of art—heroes of classical mythology, religious symbols like a young
woman with a unicorn in her lap (symbolizing virginity), profane
amusements like a man caught in the act of defecating.
And this time, if the surviving poetry (poetry) about the
snow art festival can be believed, the idea of the naked snow people
freezing to death without clothing was something of a running joke.

9. Lazy students
Medieval scholars and readers attached enormous importance to the
view of earlier authorities. Scholastic treatises are storehouses of
earlier opinions on a given topic. And as later researchers discovered
somewhat to their dismay The Travels of John Mandeville, one of
the most popular books in the entire Middle Ages, comes neither from
travels nor from John Mandeville. It’s almost entirely a compilation of
excerpts from earlier, even well-known narratives.

Pyramids shown by Wenceslaus Hollar (1607–1677)

But
this bog-standard practice fared rather poorly for one 12th century
North African student. Upon returning home after making his hajj to
Mecca, his teacher demanded, “Tell me about the pyramids of Egypt and
what you saw of them, not what you have been told.” Sorrowfully, the student had to reply, “I have nothing of direct observation to say.”
Also medieval: teachers who don’t put up with that. Because, as
al-Idrisi finishes, that student was right back off to the Nile to see
and report on the pyramids for himself.

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St. Bernard:

Go forth confidently then, you knights, and repel the foes of the cross of Christ with a stalwart heart. Know that neither death nor life can separate you from the love of God which is in Jesus Christ, and in every peril repeat, "Whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord's." What a glory to return in victory from such a battle! How blessed to die there as a martyr! Rejoice, brave athlete, if you live and conquer in the Lord; but glory and exult even more if you die and join your Lord. Life indeed is a fruitful thing and victory is glorious, but a holy death is more important than either. If they are blessed who die in the Lord, how much more are they who die for the Lord!

How secure, I say, is life when death is anticipated without fear; or rather when it is desired with feeling and embraced with reverence! How holy and secure this knighthood and how entirely free of the double risk run by those men who fight not for Christ! Whenever you go forth, O worldly warrior, you must fear lest the bodily death of your foe should mean your own spiritual death, or lest perhaps your body and soul together should be slain by him.

Indeed, danger or victory for a Christian depends on the dispositions of his heart and not on the fortunes of war. If he fights for a good reason, the issue of his fight can never be evil; and likewise the results can never be considered good if the reason were evil and the intentions perverse. If you happen to be killed while you are seeking only to kill another, you die a murderer. If you succeed, and by your will to overcome and to conquer you perchance kill a man, you live a murderer. Now it will not do to be a murderer, living or dead, victorious or vanquished. What an unhappy victory--to have conquered a man while yielding to vice, and to indulge in an empty glory at his fall when wrath and pride have gotten the better of you!

But what of those who kill neither in the heat of revenge nor in the swelling of pride, but simply in order to save themselves? Even this sort of victory I would not call good, since bodily death is really a lesser evil than spiritual death. The soul need not die when the body does. No, it is the soul which sins that shall die.

The knight of Christ, I say, may strike with confidence and die yet more confidently, for he serves Christ when he strikes, and serves himself when he falls. Neither does he bear the sword in vain, for he is God's minister, for the punishment of evildoers and for the praise of the good. If he kills an evildoer, he is not a mankiller, but, if I may so put it, a killer of evil. He is evidently the avenger of Christ towards evildoers and he is rightly considered a defender of Christians. Should he be killed himself, we know that he has not perished, but has come safely into port.

Once he finds himself in the thick of battle, this knight sets aside his previous gentleness, as if to say, "Do I not hate those who hate you, O Lord; am I not disgusted with your enemies?" These men at once fall violently upon the foe, regarding them as so many sheep. No matter how outnumbered they are, they never regard these as fierce barbarians or as awe-inspiring hordes. Nor do they presume on their own strength, but trust in the Lord of armies to grant them the victory.

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Saint Athanasius

"May God console you! ... What saddens you ... is the fact that others have occupied the churches by violence, while during this time you are on the outside. It is a fact that they have the premises – but you have the Apostolic Faith. They can occupy our churches, but they are outside the true Faith. You remain outside the places of worship, but the Faith dwells within you. Let us consider: what is more important, the place or the Faith?The true Faith, obviously. Who has lost and who has won in the struggle – the one who keeps the premises or the one who keeps the Faith? True, the premises are good when the Apostolic Faith is preached there; they are holy if everything takes place there in a holy way ..."You are the ones who are happy; you who remain within the Church by your Faith, who hold firmly to the foundations of the Faith which has come down to you from Apostolic Tradition. And if an execrable jealousy has tried to shake it on a number of occasions, it has not succeeded. They are the ones who have broken away from it in the present crisis. No one, ever, will prevail against your Faith, beloved Brothers. And we believe that God will give us our churches back some day. "Thus, the more violently they try to occupy the places of worship, the more they separate themselves from the Church. They claim that they represent the Church; but in reality, they are the ones who are expelling themselves from it and going astray. Even if Catholics faithful to Tradition are reduced to a handful, they are the ones who are the true Church of Jesus Christ."